Design and Build Great Web APIs

Chapter 2Understanding HTTP, REST, and APIs

In the previous chapter, we explored the API-First principle and learned to use the curl utility to start making simple API calls to some of the services we’ll be using throughout this book to put together our own API. In this chapter, I’m going to step back a bit and talk about some of the technical details behind those curl calls and how the common practices and patterns used to build applications on the web can help us when we design and build our own APIs.

We’ll also spend time using another important command-line tool—Git—and a related website: http://github.com. We’ll use these together to manage all the files and folders in our API project and to track and publish changes to the source code, ...